The education system in Tripura continues to be plagued by lack of adequate non-teaching staff, including clerks, in all categories of schools as well as in the directorate of the education department. The problem has come to the fore because of the inordinate delay in issuing appointment letters to the newly recruited graduate and post-graduate teachers, numbering around 6,000, who had received job offers two months ago. This has happened at a time the state government has enforced restrictions on new appointments and promotions as part of a drastic austerity drive. Officers in the education department, however, attributed the delay to the lack of adequate clerical staff in the department’s head office. Tripura has 5,300 schools of all categories with altogether 39,985 teachers, but the number of non-teaching staff is only 9,000 against the required number of 16,102.“We have created 14,853 posts of non-teaching staff but an acute resource constraint and restrictions on appointment imposed by the state government as part of an austerity drive stand in the way of recruitment,” the new director of the department of school education, Nakul Das, said. Das said some of the posts had earlier been abolished by the central government and the Planning Commission with a circular that if recruitment to such posts were made by the state, no financial grant would be available for payment of salaries and allowances to this category of employees. “The recruitment of teachers on fixed pay for three or five years is a direct result of the abolition of posts by the Planning Commission and the Centre though efforts are on to have these posts revived,” Das said. He admitted that the department of school education and the state government were also doing a lot of explaining for diversion of funds from the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in certain cases. Das added that the problems would be ultimately solved though the shortage of non-teaching staff in schools would persist for some time as a large number of employees would retire next year.